She quit her job to make you laugh

Neeti Palta quit her job to make you laugh

"One of the important things needed to be a comedian is to have a thick skin. I was rejected many times"

"Everybody can listen to the same song over and over again, but if you say the same joke, they will be less tolerant"

My dad is an Army man, so he was upset why I was doing all this. 'You are a writer,' he would say.

Neeti Palta tells us what it takes to be a comedienne in India.

Mention stand-up comedy and the names of only male comedians flash through our mind -- including All India Bakchod and Funny Leone.

So when a colleague mentioned a female stand-up comedian, I was intrigued to say the least.

Though I am no fan of stand-up comedy, I strongly believe there is nothing that men do which we can't do better.

It helped that advertising was a familiar territory, so tracking down Neeti Palta was not too tough.

Neeti Palta is among the few female stand-up comedians in India.

She had a cushy job in advertising, and was among the top of her league as senior art director at JWT.

But in her own words she was "tired of selling cola to the youth," and decided to move out of advertising.

What followed doesn't quite sound like a plan and Neeti has no qualms in admitting that there was no strategy behind her choices.

From advertising, Neeti moved to writing episodes for Galli Galli Sim Sim, when the popular children's TV show Sesame Street reached India.

Palta did the show for four years, until she attended a Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood show, where she volunteered to do on-the-spot sound effects for the lines they were saying on stage. And rest as they say is history.

"What I did on the show turned out to be quite funny, and they admitted that normally they didn't take women for the part, but I was an exception," Palta says.

This was about four years ago, and since then Neeti Palta has tickled many a funny bone across the country and overseas through the numerous shows that she has participated or organised.

How I became a stand up comedian

Being a comedian is as tough, if not tougher, as any other performance.

She is always on the lookout for something funny in life; if things are going wrong, even that would be new material for her as a comedian.

"Everybody can be funny in a group or family, but it takes a lot more to be funny on stage.

"You typically start out in pubs; it's a bunch of strangers who are there to drink and eat and you have to entertain them, make them laugh.

"One of the important things needed to be a comedian is to have a thick skin. I was rejected many times," she says.

Lot of material for her comedy comes from things that make her angry or upset her.

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Image: Neeti Palta was senior art director at JWT, a leading advertising firm before she chose to write comedy.Photographs: Neeti Palta's Facebook Page

'In places like Delhi, people with money can sometimes be very brash'

One man's meat is other man's poison, and who knows that better than Neeti Palta.

She admits to having faced tough situations when people in the audience have not taken kindly to her jokes.

Her solution to the problem has been to smile and face it.

"If you are smiling then people do not get offended," she offers.

"Some people may pass comments while seeing the show.

"In other cases, people come up to me and say, your voice is so strong we loved the fact that you have a great and loud voice," she shares about the brickbats and bouquets she has received in her career.

An appreciative audience, Palta says, is the best reward for all the hard work, because the laughs and smiles that her jokes evoke give her the most satisfaction.

She does admit there are tough times when she has been unwell and therefore not able to give her hundred percent.

However, with practice, she has managed to work around such situations without much trouble.

One of her proudest moments as a comedian was when she brought her parents to see her performance, after completing a year as a comedian.

Her parents, she admits were not too happy with her decision to do comedy, and neither had they seen her on stage.

"My dad is an Army man, so he was upset why I was doing all this.

"'You are a writer,' he would say. It was difficult for him to wrap his head around this.

"My mom was worried from a safety point of view.

"Travelling late in the night, talking to a bunch of drunk strangers, God knows who will think what.

"In places like Delhi, people with money can sometimes be very brash," admits Palta.

So when she brought her parents to see her show, an old Sardarji walked up to her and patted her back for her performance.

"His kids had brought him to the show and they were feeling very uncomfortable when the previous comedian was using foul language.

"He said he loved my show and that my parents would be very proud of me.